The issue of fatherhood seems to be everywhere. We’ve explored Tony Blair the new dad and Gordon Brown the bereaved father. Alan Milburn dramatised the man torn between career and caring. Most recently, David Blunkett has brought us the Cabinet version of the separated dad seeking contact with this child. Indeed, if you add in Jack Straw’s trip to the police station over his son, then the holders of the four major offices of state have all seen their paternity publicly paraded.

In the autumn, both Tony Blair and Michael Howard spoke in highly personal terms about their own lives as fathers, providing detail that male politicians would not have considered offering voters even a few years ago.


Their statements reflect how central an issue support for parents is expected to be in the forthcoming general election, but they also demonstrate a huge cultural shift taking place among families, which, hitherto, male politicians have been slow to spot. With dads typically doing one third of the parental childcare of under-fives (according to EOC research), the caring side of fatherhood is no longer a sentimental hope, it is a daily reality for many families.

Meanwhile, who can ignore the increasingly vociferous protests by Fathers4Justice? Since the Commons “purple powder” protest, Fathers4Justice has sent Batman and Robin on new and ever more surprising missions to publicise its campaign to reform the law governing parental access to children post-separation.

Yet amid all the noise about fatherhood, there seems to be a lack of vision; there is no great project to harness the full potential that involved fathers can offer their children. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the F4J campaign, it remains narrowly focused on one particular issue – post-separation contact. Its over-concentration on legal reform neglects other issues facing separated families. Crucially, the campaign has little to say on a host of other fatherhood issues that affect families.
  Politicians, for their part, have not progressed much beyond the notion that they really had better toss something to fathers in the great parental benefits giveaway that is expected to be a major feature of the party manifestos. So amid the pledges of better-paid maternity leave, it is expected that the existing statutory two weeks paternity leave will paid more generously and that some part of maternity leave will become transferable to fathers.

This sounds fine, but will all this make much difference to children? At Fathers Direct, the UK national information centre on fatherhood, our vision is of a state enabling mothers and fathers to work in partnership for the best interests of children. When successfully achieved, such partnership can work wonders. We know, for example, that good fathering can fix many annoying problems that bedevil governments, from crime, low  educational achievement and child poverty to blighted communities. It is as promising as another North Sea oil field.

Research now clearly demonstrates that children of involved fathers typically have better social skills by nursery school age, do better at exams at 16, and are less likely to have a criminal record at 21. A released prisoner who gets stuck into fatherhood when he gets out, is six times less likely to re-offend. And a good dad keeps you sane: the long-term mental health benefits are recorded in children, teenagers and adults.

We also know that the children of an involved father – living with or separated from the mother – are better off financially. If he is a resource to his family, he is, typically also an asset to his community and to his employer. And if you find a man who takes his caring responsibilities seriously, you will usually find his partner enjoying better opportunities to work. When he refuses to leave his fatherhood at reception on Monday morning, picking it up on Friday evening, that man also offers fairer competition to female colleagues trying to balance the demands of work and motherhood.
The government’s new National Service Framework for Children recognises this reality.

Calling for public services to engage properly with fathers, it declares: “Involvement of prospective and new fathers in a child’s life is extremely important for maximising the life-long well-being and outcomes of the child … Good parenting by fathers is associated with better mental health in children, higher quality of later relationships, less criminality, better school attendance and behaviour, and better examination results.”

So, will the policy options being put forward by the main political parties really measure up to the government’s NSF call for fatherhood to be taken seriously?

I am sceptical. Better paid paternity leave will undoubtedly increase take-up, and getting dads really involved from the start is key to long-term good fathering. Making maternity leave transferable sends an important cultural signal that caring for young children is not only women’s work. It also gives families more choices. But don’t be fooled. Any politician advocating transferability knows from the international evidence that very few men take up this option.

Experience abroad demonstrates that the only change which really transforms the opportunities for new fathers is the “daddy month”, a use-it-or-lose-it dedicated period of paid time off for dads in the early years. The Swedes made maternity leave transferable in 1974, but then realised that uptake by dads was minimal and so introduced the first daddy month in 1995. Since 1998, when two dedicated daddy months (alongside two mummy months) were introduced alongside 15 months transferable maternity leave, leave take-up by men has increased dramatically.

According to Lisa Bergh, Swedish minister for equal opportunities, most fathers in this country take six weeks leave today. Of the parents who take more than a year out of work after the birth of a child, nearly a fifth are now men. Crucially, the existence of the daddy month impacts on long-term father involvement. In Denmark, which like many Scandinavian countries has daddy months, 41 per cent of fathers spend 28 plus hours per week looking after their children under 16. For British fathers, the figure is just 23 per cent. In Sweden, fathers now do 45 per cent of the parental child care.
 
So when you look at party manifestos making promises about encouraging father involvement, look closely to see if the daddy month has got through the policy mangle. If it isn’t there, then question whether style and presentation has been substituted for real change. I fear that we will not see the daddy month being proposed in manifestos until the 2009 election. That will be nearly 15 years after the Swedes and much of Scandinavia introduced with such great effect. Nearly 10 million British babies and their families will have missed out on it in that period.